As the year comes to a close, we took the morning to reflect on 2025 in the BBP world. As we considered our year, we sat with such deep gratitude for the work we are so fortunate to do- to train amazing therapists from across Canada in an orientation that savours individual expression, creativity and relationality – more about thathere😊
In ten years of training therapists across Canada, we have had the pleasure of working with and mentoring therapists who work with diverse populations and with a broad clinical scope. Common to them all, is the capacity for generosity of the heart and commitment to advancing their craft as psychotherapists.
So, here are some of the highlights from 2025
Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy 2-year online training – 2025, graduated two cohorts. It’s always bittersweet to complete a training. The depth of learning, vulnerability, stretching, connection and integration is profound, and it is moving to witness and be a part of. We hear over and over again, “I knew this training would change my practice, I didn’t know it would change my life”. No exaggeration here – but really, how do you advertise this? Well, that’s what blogs are for – here are links to what some alumni have said 😊 first blog,second blog, and third blog.
Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy 2-year online training – 2025, began two cohorts – March and May. What can I say, it’s amazing to watch clinicians, both new to the field, and seasoned alike, fall in love with the body and bring the body into practice. To witness therapists fall into the right hemispheric work is a ride – bumpy, mucking about at first, but then, WOW, it all comes together in the second year (for our current cohorts, that comes in 2026). Beautiful to see people take the work and find their way, to take Attachment Theory and apply it to clinical practice; to understand and bring the body front and centre into clinical process, moving from mindful awareness to somatic processing (here’s a blog all about that), and to work skillfully through a Psychodynamic lens that attends to the therapeutic relationship, relational dynamics, defenses, etc, to move therapy forward. For more information, click here.
Embodying the Heart Retreat: An Online Intensive for Therapist Evolution. In November we re-launched our retreat work, this time online. And, how fun. We invited creative process into the mix of this three day online intensive for SAP students and alumni, and never mind fun, it was POWERFUL, POTENT, and PURPOSEFUL. We honed in on therapist practice and evolution, inviting therapists to process and reflect on their clinical practice, asking in essence, what is your practice asking of you and what do you need from it? We ran the retreat as a fundraiser and donated over half of the fees collected to the BC SPCA (so $5000 for the animals). We can hardly wait to run it again – slated for November 2026 – more info here.
In April, Stacy ran his Chronic Shame in Clinical Practice: An Embodied Relational Perspective online workshop for therapists. Every time Stacy offers the workshop, we reach more therapists from across Canada who want to better understand how chronic shame is part of insecure attachment and hides in plain sight. It is, what I would call, a sticky part of clinical practice where it operates, as Stacy writes, like an invisible hand that guides one’s life. This workshop didn’t disappoint – over five weeks we gathered and talked about chronic shame in clinical practice, its etiology, how it presents (and hides), how to work with it from an embodied relational perspective, read, right hemispheric vs cognitive approach (which is refractory), and perhaps most significantly, Stacy starts out the workshop with the agenda to humanize folks with chronic shame. I feel teary writing this – it’s such a powerful opening and invitation – of course, I’m taking the liberty to extend it here to you, the reader. Here’s a link to the workshop info, and I’m happy to say, Stacy is offering it again in April 2026 – more info here.
Wildfire Trauma Fundraiser – in April we offered our third lecture and fundraiser on working with Wildfire Trauma. In 2025 we expanded this presentation and invited the wider therapist community, which included therapists from across Canada (the previous two lectures/fundraisers were limited to BBP therapists). As always, the fundraiser (as part of the BC SPCA Champions for Animals program) was well attended and we raised $3350 for the BC SPCA. We have plans to offer this again spring of 2026.
As a training program, our community service fundraising is focused on animal welfare, and 2025 was an excellent year in terms of funds raised and donated. This year we donated to two organisations – the BC SPCA and to Cat’s Cradle Animal Rescue. All totaled, we raised $8350 for the BC SPCAand donated an additional $2000 to the Cat’s Cradle Animal Rescue feral cat program.
In June 2025 Lisa closed her clinical practice after twenty years. It was hard to say goodbye, not only to the people in my practice, some of them who I had walked beside for a very long time, but to close that chapter of my clinical world and work. It was a difficult decision, but one that has opened new possibilities for teaching and curriculum development and expansion.
In October, I offered the Attachment, the Body and Relational Repair: Three Pillars of Clinical Practice Workshop. Over 5 evenings online we gathered with a group of therapists from across Canada to explore how attachment trauma deeply impacts the integrity of the self, and is at the heart of insecure attachment, disrupting healthy development, and forging a neurophysiological template that endures throughout the lifespan. We brought understanding to how to apply attachment theory to clinical practice through an embodied relational lens. As always, the discussion was rich and 5 weeks felt like we were saying goodbye just as we were getting started (yes, this is a plug for the 2-year Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training).
Most important of all, we were able to work with therapists across Canada in meaningful and transformative ways, not only for their clinical evolution, but also for their own personal evolution. Recognizing the gift of leading 13 cohorts of therapists on this journey is difficult to quantify and articulate in terms of our feelings of privilege and gratitude.
From Somatic Experiencing to Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy
I’m in the process of closing my clinical practice—after 21 years—to make more space for my teaching practice, but also to explore new frontiers that have been calling for my attention for a while. It took my clients by surprise, and truth be told, it surprised and continues to surprise me. I love my work. I have profound and meaningful connections with the people in my practice, all of them, and some of them I have known and worked with for 17 years. That’s a long time.
As I find myself in transition, I have been reflecting on where it all started, this love that I have for therapy, for working in and with the bodyself and with trauma. I have been tracking the unfolding of my evolution and understanding of how to work with and support the healing of trauma, trauma of all kinds, but specifically, the heart of my clinical and teaching practice has always been the reparation of early attachment injuries.
If we go back to the beginning, to the fall of 2001, I saw a demonstration of Somatic Experiencing. I was in my first semester of grad school. I entered grad school knowing I was interested in trauma work but had assumed I would learn and use EMDR (I never did), but I was captivated by somatic work. I don’t know that I could grasp the profundity of what I was seeing, but my body knew. I remember as I witnessed the demonstration, I had an involuntary vocalization—not a gasp, not a laugh, but some sort of bubbling forth of a knowing—this is it I thought, I need to know more. Two months later as I started my second semester of my Master’s, I started training in Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing.
For the next 12 years I was deeply immersed in the somatic world—in 2006 I began working with Dr. Sharon Stanley as she built her Somatic Transformation training program. This immersion served me well—Sharon is a gifted and generous clinician and educator, and I was fortunate to be mentored by her until the end of 2014. I had found my clinical home in the somatic world.
Homes change 😊. I began studying with Dr. Allan Schore sometime around 2010 and I stretched my clinical mind and practice: I continue to appreciate Allan’s brilliance and the vast disciplines his work traverses. During this time, I was departing more and more from my somatic roots and teachings. In 2015, I studied with Dr. Mary Main and Dr. Erik Hesse in the Adult Attachment Interview Training (AAI)—that training was significant in putting into words the relational dynamics I was working with in my practice that were replications of early relational injuries and also embedded in the body. In retrospect, it was the AAI that helped me articulate my knowing and continues to serve as foundational to my understanding of relational trauma, which is the heart of my clinical work. This created yet another home.
Fast forward to 2016 and I started my own Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy 2-year training for therapists. I had been teaching workshops for the previous twelve years but this was different. I was able to have a bigger canvas to explore and expand upon my understanding of how to work with folks that have an insecure attachment from a somatic lens. It started out as a good program, but I’m excited to say that my thinking and knowing from there has significantly shifted again and again as I leaned into relational and interpersonal psychoanalytic psychotherapy training beginning in 2019. This too feels like another clinical home.
I think that what’s true for me is that over my clinical career I have found many clinical homes that continue to be foundational in my clinical thinking, practice and teaching. Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy (SAP), as it stands today, is an embodied way of practicing psychotherapy oriented toward working with relational injuries (insecure attachment).
Now, SAP has evolved into an outstanding training program and community. That’s not even hard to say—I have been supported by incredible teachers, some of the most brilliant hearts and minds in the field, and I have taught hundreds of amazing therapists that continue to invite me to expand my thinking and practice. Perhaps most significantly, I have walked with incredible people in my practice over time as they, and we processed, their early wounds and they found healing. This is where the work really happens, in clinical spaces, where theory meets practice, and emergent process happens and builds new practice and theory. Kind of a spiral situation.
While there’s lots more to my story, I find myself at the next opening of the spiral. I’ve found my next teacher, it’s in a different discipline, related but outside of psychotherapy. Sometimes, when I listen to him speak, I weep…and that tells me, like that involuntary vocalization 24 years ago, follow this—see what doors open, bring your curiosity—I think there’s another home here.
I’ve been having lots of conversations with therapists looking to enroll in our Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy Training about working with the body in therapy. Lots of therapists identify that they in fact already do use the body in their clinical practices, by asking,
what’s happening in your body?
where do you notice that?
is there a sensation that tells you that?
and then what they share with me is that they often feel uncertain about what to do with that information, or how to take it beyond their initial question/intervention – of course, this is what we teach in SAP over the two years! These conversations inevitably beg the question, is that enough? Is it enough to have people identify what is happening in their body and then notice it, stay with it, watch it? My response is, enough for what? What is the purpose of drawing the client’s attention to their internal sensation or felt sense? What is the working theory, not only about why the therapist is inquiring about the body, but also inviting clients to stay with it? That’s the guiding question here, what is the purpose?
If the intention is to merely have people increase their capacity to be present, be with what is, and increase capacity to tolerate discomfort, then yes, the status quo of how people often use the body might be a worthwhile intervention, though perhaps not the best intervention, as most therapists, prior to somatic training, choose to include the body at a time when there is distress, intense emotion, or disconnection/disembodiment. (More on this later).
If the intention to help process and metabolize material in the system (relational and incident traumatic material), then no, just dropping in and noticing the sensation, and staying with it, particularly difficult or uncomfortable sensations, is not likely going to further the processing of the neurophysiological material or psyche reorganization, and if it does, it will be short-lived. What is likely though, is that simply focusing on the body during these times of arousal will move the system out of the processing window into high/hyper or low/hypo arousal as the dysregulation in the system creates more and more dysregulation. Alternatively, the client may continue to feel the sensation but not really garner further process or understanding from it – for example, the tightness remains tightness, so the intervention fizzles without any further clinical or embodied process unfolding.
In order to process (trauma, grief, loss, etc.), the work is to up and down regulate the autonomic nervous system along side the story. This is where BBP/SAP differs from other somatic dominant trainings – one of our guiding principles is that people need to tell their story, and be witnessed relationally, rather than just experience and process what is happening in their body, so working to re-organize the psyche and body in concert. When we invite the body into the clinical dialogue and process, we want to be able to work to help people to not only be present to what is happening within, but to the nuanced truths of the story that also help anchor and facilitate processing and internal re-organization, both of which are key to change.
Change is key to therapy. We know the body and psyche are wired together, and that trauma is held in the right (versus the left), so we understand as therapists how bringing the body into practice offers an effective way to attend to and process traumatic material (of all kinds) in order to regulate and process the physiological body and reorganize the psyche and internal working models, and ultimately bring forth a new narrative understanding of self and story.
For clinicians, working adeptly with the body necessitates a solid understanding of the Polyvagal Theory (Porges) (read, the Polyvagal made simple) and the Window of Tolerance (Siegal). These conceptual frameworks offer therapists a theoretical framework to guide the use of somatic interventions, rather than simply inserting them into the therapy. Further, I would suggest that correlating sensations and felt sense into this framework is necessary for therapists to have a sophisticated capacity to work with, and in the body.
If we circle back to these conversations I’m having about bringing the body into practice, it seems to me that what we are differentiating here is mindfulness and somatic processing. While there is overlap, they ultimately have different purposes. Mindfulness is a practice oriented towards increasing one’s capacity to be with what is. Somatic process has the intention to shift the internal state and process material. These are significant differences when thinking about the purpose of inviting the body into the clinical conversation. In this way, I want to underscore not only the difference between mindfulness and somatic therapy, but the difference in intention. Somatic therapy is used to process material. It may use mindful presence to attune and be with experience, but it at its core, it’s about shifting and processing—making it different, not learning to be with what is.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about early experiences with caregivers that lead to insecure attachment and the formation of chronic shame. We know experiences of overt shaming, neglect, chronic misattunement, or a lack of relational repair, are reflections of the caregivers own relational injuries and likely reflect their own early experiences with their caregivers, and their own insecure attachment and chronic shame. Another, possibly less obvious avenue of chronic shame creation, than say, overt shaming or neglect in early life, is through objectification. Hooten (2019) writes, “A child that is objectified, whether adored or criticized, who is evaluated instead of being joined in their energetic and emotional state, produces a state of disconnection and shame” (p. 33). I see the evidence of this clearly in the many folks I sit with in my clinical practice which focuses on the healing of trauma, specifically relational trauma.
As I consider the effect of these early experiences, I am reminded of a quote from O.B. Epstein (2022) that for the child, these interactions form “…micro-moments of accumulated grief which never seem to go away, quite the opposite; they will continue to generate a sense of insecurity and shame in the growing child and be present during adulthood” (p. 48-49). This linking of shame and grief has real clinical relevance in the healing of chronic shame, because at some point in the treatment, as the client comes to see and better understand the multitude of ways that the unseen hand of chronic shame has formed, guided, and limited their life, both past and present, a real grief and sadness will emerge. In this expanding understanding of their life and the ongoing impact of chronic shame in it, there will be a grieving and reconciling of missed opportunities, possibilities, relationships, and how compromised their sense of feeling free and creative and solid in what Bromberg (2017) calls the “…unique pleasure of oneness…” (p. 19) has been due to chronic shame. Although this part of the healing can feel overwhelming and unending for clients, clinically, I see it as an indicator of their increased capacity, and progress in their healing, which brings the promise of not just decreased chronic shame symptoms, but an increased stability and comfort in themselves, which has been largely elusive.
Epstein, O. B. (Ed.). (2022). Shame Matters: Attachment and Relational Perspectives for Psychotherapists. Routledge.
Hooten, J. (2019). Shame: An Existential Wound. The Knowing Field. (10), p.29-44.
Solomon, M. F., & Siegel, D. J. (2017). How People Change: Relationships and Neuroplasticity in Psychotherapy (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). WW Norton & Company.
As a play therapist, Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy (SAP) has expanded my practice and become the framework I use to conceptualize my clinical practice. I understand the children, their families, and their life experiences through a lens of early attachment connections, injuries and repairs. Play therapy is an imaginal, right brained modality and therefore often ambiguous, difficult to measure or interpret, which makes it challenging to communicate progress to caregivers. Having a breadth of understanding of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), attachment theory and relational practice, internal working models (IWM), shame and chronic shame, embodiment, the intersubjective field, and working with the right hemisphere, makes the work more easily articulated and understood within a variety of theoretical and conceptual frameworks.
As a clinician, I favour a non-directive style of play therapy, meaning I follow the child’s lead, and we spend our time engaged in the activities chosen by the child. My work is a combination of Expressive Play Therapy, Synergetic Play Therapy, and Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy. I offer child clients an intentionally curated play space that includes puppets, sand tray therapy, a doll house, crafts, board games, art supplies and items to play house or dress up. The activity options are nearly endless as the child begins to follow their inner knowing about what needs to come next. We create what they require and sometimes find ourselves crawling through fabric tunnels into a fort made of bedsheets to enjoy a picnic lunch with our community of plush rabbits.
My role in sessions can look simple to an untrained observer; like I am sitting with a child while they play in a lovely room; however, the work is actually clinically sophisticated and nuanced. My focus is on creating a safe-enough environment and therapeutic relationship where the child can relax into themselves, freely express their inner world, explore challenges, and share what it feels like to be them. My therapeutic stance is to offer co-regulation and opportunities for relational repair, and meet their expressions with acceptance and permission. At times, we work with symbols and metaphors that need to be witnessed and held in order to be transformed and integrated. At other times, we are attending to developmental needs and stages that have not been met, and that need support to progress.
Many children have easy access to the right hemisphere and its symbolic, metaphoric, and intuitively creative expressions. As a result, I seldom have to work past a “defended left hemisphere” (Quillman, 2012, p. 5), as often therapists must do in therapy with adults, and we frequently spend the therapeutic hour in the imaginal, both embodied and in the upper right hemisphere. I work with the imaginal as taught in SAP with the addition of three-dimensional play objects such as figurines, puppets, or a family of cats in the doll house.
When a child has experienced trauma, the play can be rigid, restricted, and repetitive. Bringing healing images into the trauma narrative at the right time, in the right way, can encourage the expression needed to transform and integrate. This integration expands the child’s window of tolerance, increasing their capacity for stress and emotions, resulting in a decrease in challenging behaviours. I may offer a tiny blanket to a baby that is repeatedly stuck in the trunk of a car. I might set up a hospital, if the child can tolerate that level of care, for the soldiers that are being annihilated. This aspect of my practice uses the language of symbols and metaphors to move difficult, unconscious, or disavowed material.
Much of my play therapy practice, as in SAP with adults, is a focus on the ANS. I observe the child’s physical body for cues, notice what sensations I am experiencing in my own body, as well as the themes in play that reflect the state of the child’s nervous system state. Hyperaroused play is bigger, louder, faster, often intense, frantic or disorganized. It can include violence and aggression. Hypoaroused play tends to be slow, easily distracted, floaty, hard for the therapist to stay focused on, and could include items buried underneath the sand or dying. Co-regulating the ANS happens in a variety of ways, and remaining regulated and connected to myself to ensure I am the strongest, dominant nervous system state is often enough to help the child shift into regulation. I might use more overt body movements like rocking back and forth or getting up to walk. When appropriate, I name my body sensations or emotions and then regulate myself in a way that the child can see or sense, activating the mirror neuron system. Through these times of co-regulation, the child’s nervous system can learn regulation from mine. Additionally, I might invite the child into an activity intended to shift the ANS either down or up regulating into the window of optimal arousal. To this end, we will march the room, or go outside into the garden, or I could offer a cue to feel the soft carpet under our feet.
Relational healing and repair, much of the focus of SAP, is also much of the work in my practice. Coming alongside a child with ANS dysregulation to support them to modulate the intensity and co-regulate is relational work that tends to early attachment disruptions, whereby the therapist is the “psychobiological regulator” (Carroll and Schore, 2001, cited in Gill, 2009, p. 362). Children experience co-regulation in my play room, and I work with their family system when it is available, intending that over time the child client is able to access co-regulation outside of therapy, and eventually an increase in their capacity for self-regulation. In working towards relational repair of attachment injuries, there is opportunity to use verbal and physical reflections to mirror the child back to themselves, disrupting their IWM and over time shifting their concept of self.
Bringing SAP into the playroom also brings an awareness to my own nervous system so I can be intentional about taking care of myself in the midst of the complicated experiences of my clients. In the intensity of hyperaroused play, where we are acting out traumatic material, the child’s projections often land on the therapist. Being killed in an intense sword fight repeatedly can leave a residue of dysregulation as there are real emotions in the play- real fear, helplessness, or terror. Having a strong capacity to regulate my ANS and understand the impact of working with trauma, and how to care for one’s self are key to longevity in this career.
Integrating SAP into my play therapy practice has resulted in deeper and more rewarding work for me and the children and families I meet with. By bringing in a comprehensive focus that weaves the body, attachment and relational repair, and applying it in developmentally appropriate ways, in concert with my play therapy, I have an increased therapeutic canvas to understand and relate to my clients and their families. This comprehensive understanding of early trauma and the reparative responses needed, allows me to access the core of the child’s wounding which is often at the foundation of the behavioural symptoms that brought them to my play room initially.
Gill, S. (2009). The therapist as psychobiological regulator: Dissociation, affect attunement and clinical process. Clinical Social Work Journal, 38(3), 260 – 268.
Quillman, T. (2012). Neuroscience and therapist self-disclosure: Deepening right brain to right brain communication between therapist and patient. Clinical Social Work Journal. 40, 1 – 9
Rachael Pasemko, RSW, RCC, RPT-S is a play therapist and group practice owner in Kamloops, BC. She loves working with the language of symbols and metaphors, integrating the body into the therapeutic process, and supporting children and families to find more ease. Rachael co-facilitates a neuroscience based parenting group that teaches parents what play therapists do, offers consultation to other play therapists, and can be reached at rachaelpasemko@gmail.com
